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An Introduction 3 страница



She shakes her head. “And now there are these Christian Union women running around, and the Morality Party has somebody on the City Council—he’s running for mayor now, I heard. He doesn’t have a chance in hell, but still. Him and his people will eat all this tower business up with a damn spoon. ”

“But don’t you want to—” Juniper begins.

“What I want is to get some sleep. I have an early shift tomorrow. ” Agnes’s voice is clipped and cold as she rummages in a battered trunk. “The police will be out looking, by now. You two should stay here. ” She tosses a stack of moth-eaten wool at Juniper, not looking at her. “For the night. ”

For the night. Not forever, not happily ever after.

Of course not.

Agnes spreads her own blanket on the floor and rolls a spare skirt into a pillow. Bella struggles upright, gesturing Agnes to her own bed, but Agnes ignores her.

She lies down on the floor with her body curled tight, a nautilus-shell around her own belly. Juniper glares resentfully at her back before whispering to the pitch pine wand. The witch-light fades and the room darkens from summer-gold to winter-gray.

Juniper lies on the floor beside Agnes and tries to keep her fists from clenching and her teeth from grinding. Her body is strung tight from a night and a day spent running, sleeping only in rattling snatches on the train.

She shuffles and tosses and thinks of their old four-poster bed in the attic. She had trouble sleeping even as a girl, counting whip-poor-will calls and waiting for their daddy’s unsteady steps to fall quiet. On bad nights Agnes would stroke her hair and Bella would whisper witch-tales in the dark.

“You up, Bell? ” The sound of her own voice surprises Juniper. “You still remember any stories? ”

At first she thinks that Bella won’t answer her. Will tell her she’s too old for tales of maidens and crones and spinning wheels. But her voice rises above the creak and rustle of the boarding house and Juniper can almost believe she is still ten years old, still one-of-three instead of one-alone.

“Once upon a time…”

 

 

THE TALE OF THE SLEEPING MAIDEN

Once upon a time there was a king and queen who longed for a child but couldn’t have one. They tried spells and prayers and charms, but after many long years the kingdom still had no heir. In desperation they held a grand feast and invited six witches to bless their kingdom. The six witches granted six fair gifts—peace and prosperity, good health and good harvests, agreeable weather and biddable peasants—but just as the feast was ending, a seventh witch arrived. She was young and graceful and had the sort of face that launches ships and eats hearts. She wore a coal-black adder twined around her left arm and a sharp-toothed smile on her lips.

She told the king and queen that, since they failed to invite her to their feast, she brought a curse instead of a blessing: one day a young maiden would prick her finger on a spindle and the castle would fall into an endless sleep from which no one could wake it.

The king took all reasonable precautions. He ordered all the spinning wheels burned and permitted no unwed women within the castle walls. He kept his throne for one-and-twenty years.

Until the day a strange maiden arrived at the castle gates. The guards should have turned her away, but it had been too long since the seventh witch had been seen, and the Maiden knew the ways and words to make them forget their orders. She wore her familiar like a black-glass necklace around her throat.

The Maiden strode unseen through the castle, smiling as she went, until she climbed to the top of the tallest tower, where a spinning wheel waited for her. She reached her pale finger to the spindle’s end.

There are many versions of this story, but there is always a pricked finger. There are always three drops of the Maiden’s blood.

Her blood touched the castle floor and a spell drifted through the castle. Every living creature fell into a sudden slumber. Pies burned in the ovens and spears clattered to the floor; cats slept with their claws outstretched toward sleeping mice, and dogs lay down beside foxes.

In the whole castle only the Maiden moved. She stole the king’s crown from his brow and settled it on her own head.

The Maiden ruled for one hundred years. She might have ruled forever—who can say what ways a witch might find to live beyond their years? —except that a brave knight heard tales of a cursed kingdom and rode to its rescue. The Maiden retreated to the tallest tower and grew rose-briars around it, vicious and sharp-spined, so thick even the knight and his shining sword couldn’t cut through them.

The knight set fire to the tower, instead. As the witch burned, her spell was broken and the rest of the castle woke from its endless sleep. The knight plucked the witch’s crown from the ashes and presented it to the king on bended knee. The king pulled him to his feet and announced that he and the queen had finally found a fitting heir.

The knight and the kingdom lived happily ever after, although no rose ever bloomed for miles around, no matter how rich the soil or how talented the gardener. And there were still stories about a young woman who walked in the deep woods sometimes, with a black snake beside her.

 

 

Sister, sister,

Look around,

Something’s lost

And must be found!

A spell to find what can’t be found, requiring a pinch of salt & a sharp eye

Agnes Amaranth lies awake long after her sister’s story.

She thinks about witching and wanting and thrones without heirs, babies unborn. She thinks about the second pulse in her belly and the memory of pennyroyal on her tongue.

She must fall asleep eventually, because when she opens her eyes she sees sunrise tip-toeing into the room. Bile bubbles in her throat and she retches into the chamber pot as quietly as she can. Neither of her sisters stir.

Bella’s mouth is crimped tight even in sleep, as if her lips are untrustworthy things. The last time Agnes saw her she was weeping silently as she packed her things, watching Agnes with her eyes huge and sad, as if she didn’t deserve every bit of what she got. Clearly she’s landed on her feet, working in a fancy library with her beloved books.

Juniper sleeps in a heedless, childlike sprawl, all elbows and knees. The toes of her left foot are curled with scars, the puckered flesh reaching up her ankle in a shape almost like fingers. Agnes wonders how long it took to heal and if it still hurts.

Her eyes fall on the battered brass locket lying against Juniper’s collarbone. She remembers it swinging from Mags’s neck, the way she’d hold it sometimes and look up the mountainside with her eyes misted over. Mags never talked much about the daughter she lost—their mother, who drew her last breath just as Juniper drew her first—but Agnes could see her mother in the shape of her grandmother’s silences: the scabbed-over places, the wounded days when Mags stayed in bed with the quilts pulled high.

Agnes lights the stove and cuts butter into a skillet, letting the pop and sizzle wake the others. They stretch and yawn, watching her crack eggs and boil coffee.

They take their tin plates in silence. Juniper eats like it’s been days since she saw a square meal. Bella picks at her food, staring out the window. Agnes breathes carefully through her mouth and tries not to look at the slick jelly of the egg whites.

When the food is gone there’s nothing to do but leave. Part ways. Settle back into their own stories and forget about lost towers and lost sisters.

None of them moves. Juniper fidgets, trailing her finger through the runny yolk as it dries.

“So. ” Agnes pretends she’s speaking to a stranger, just another boarding-house girl passing through. “Where will you go now? ”

She’s hoping Juniper will say: Straight the hell back home. Or maybe even: To find good, honest work like my big sister. Instead her mouth curls with a reckless little smile and she says, “To join up with those suffrage ladies just as fast as I can. ”

Bella’s eyes swivel away from the window for the first time. She covers her mouth with her palm and says faintly, “Oh, my. ”

Agnes resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Why? So you can wear a fancy dress and wave a sign? Get laughed at? Don’t waste your time. ”

Juniper’s smile hardens. “Voting doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me. ” She’s still fooling with her egg yolk, swirling it into gummy circles. Agnes’s stomach heaves.

“Look, all that ‘votes for women’ stuff sounds real noble and all, but they don’t mean women like you and me. They mean nice uptown ladies with big hats and too much time on their hands. It doesn’t matter to you or me who gets to be mayor or president, anyhow. ”

Juniper shrugs at her, sullen, childish, and Agnes drops her voice lower. “Daddy’s dead, June. You can’t piss him off anymore. ”

Juniper’s head snaps up, eyes boiling green, hair tangled like a black hedge of roses around her face. “You think I still give a single shit about him? ” She hisses it so hot and mean that Agnes thinks she must give two or three shits, at least. “Someone or some-witch worked a spell yesterday. The kind that hasn’t been seen since our great-great-great-grandmama’s days. It felt…” Juniper’s jaw works. She taps her chest and Agnes knows she’s trying to find words to describe the swell of power, the sweet sedition of magic in her veins. “It felt impossible. Important. Don’t you want to know where it came from? Don’t you think it maybe had something to do with the herd of suffragists running around the square? ”

“I know that’s what the police’ll think. Half the papers already call them witches. Don’t be a fool, June, please—”

Agnes is interrupted by Bella, who lunges from her seat at the foot of the bed to seize Juniper’s plate. She clutches it, peering through her spectacles at the trio of yolky circles Juniper has drawn on its surface. “What’s this? ”

Juniper blinks down at the remains of her breakfast. “Uh. Eggs? ”

“The design, June. Where did you see this? ”

Juniper lifts one shoulder. “On the tower door, I guess. ”

Bella’s head tilts, owl-like. “On the what? ”

“You didn’t see the door? On my side of the tower there was a door, old and wooden, all overgrown with roses, and there were three circles on it, overlapping. And words, too, but I couldn’t make sense of them. ”

Bella’s face goes taut, intent in a way that Agnes recalls from their childhood, when Bella would get to the good part of a book. “What language was it? And did the circles have eyes? Or tails? Could they have been serpents, do you think? ”

“Maybe. Why? ”

But Bella ignores the question. Her eyes are searching Juniper’s face now. They land on her lips, where Agnes can see the dark blush of a bruise and the tattered red of torn skin. Bella lifts her fingertips toward it, her expression filled with wonder or maybe terror. “Maiden’s blood, ” she whispers. Juniper flinches from her touch.

Bella’s fingers fall away. Juniper’s plate clangs to the floor. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I have to go. Very sorry. ” She tosses the words behind her like coins for beggars, a careless jumble, as she reaches for the door.

“What? You’re leaving? ” Juniper is sputtering, cheeks reddening. “But I just found you! You can’t just leave. ” Agnes hears the unspoken again hovering in the air, but Bella is already gone, calling back carelessly, “I rent a room in Bethlehem Heights, between Second and Sanctity, if you need me. ”

Agnes watches her leave with a strange hollowness in her chest. “Well. ” She scrapes her sister’s eggs back into the pan with unnecessary force. “Good riddance. ”

Juniper whirls. “And why’s that? ”

“Because Bella can’t keep her damn mouth shut! God knows what Daddy would have done if you hadn’t—” Agnes shivers hard, as if winter has come early, as if she’s sixteen again and her daddy is coming toward her with that red glow in his eyes.

Juniper doesn’t seem to have heard her. There’s a glassy vacancy in her face that makes Agnes think of a little girl watching her father yell with her hands pressed over her ears, refusing to hear.

Agnes unpeels her fingernails from her palms and carefully doesn’t look at the cedar staff propped by the door. “My shift starts soon. I’ll talk to Mr. Malton, see if they need another girl on the floor. You can”—she swallows, feeling the bounds of her circle stretch like seams that might split, and makes herself finish—“you can stay here. Till you’re on your feet. ”

But Juniper lifts her chin, looks down her crooked nose at Agnes. “I’m not working at some factory. I already told you: I’m signing up with the suffrage ladies. I’m going to find that tower. Fight for something. ”

It’s such a youngest-sister thing to say that Agnes wants to slap her. In the witch-tales it’s always the youngest who is the best-beloved, the most-worthy, the one bound for some grander destiny than her sisters. The other two are too ugly or selfish or boring to get fairy godmothers or even beastly husbands. The stories never mentioned boarding-house rent or laundry or aching knuckles from a double-shift at the mill. They never mentioned babies that needed feeding or choices that needed making.

Agnes swallows all those horseshit stories. “That’s all well and good, but causes don’t pay much, I heard. They don’t feed you or give you a place to sleep. You need to—”

Juniper’s lips peel back in a sudden animal snarl. “I don’t need a thrice-damned thing from you. ” She takes a step closer, finger aimed like an arrow at Agnes’s chest. “You left, remember? I made it seven years without you and I sure as shit don’t need you now. ”

Guilt worms in Agnes’s belly, but she keeps her face set. “I did what I had to. ”

Juniper turns away, pulling on her cloak, running fingers through her black-bracken hair. “Bella knows something, seems like. Is Bethlehem Heights a county or a city? ”

Agnes blinks. “It’s a neighborhood. On the east side, just past the College. ”

“Don’t see why a city should need more than one name. So where’s Second and Sanctity? ”

“The streets are numbered, June. You just follow the grid. ”

Juniper shoots her a harassed look. “How’s that supposed to help if I don’t know where—” Her face goes blank. Her eyes trace some invisible line through the air. “Never mind. Don’t need a damn grid, after all. ” She takes the cedar staff and limps into the hall as if she knows precisely where she’s going.

Which, Agnes realizes, she does. She feels it, too: a tugging between her ribs. An invisible kite-string stretched tight between her and her sisters, thrumming with unsaid things and unfinished business. It feels like a beckoning finger, a hand shoving between her shoulder blades, a voice whispering a witch-tale about three sisters lost and found.

But witch-tales are for children, and Agnes doesn’t like being told what to do. She shuts her door so hard the cross-stitched verse swings on its nail. She listens alone to the uneven thump of her sister’s footsteps.


Three circles woven together, or maybe three snakes swallowing their own tails: Beatrice has seen this shape before. Beatrice knows to whom it belongs.

The Last Three Witches of the West.

It’s the sign the Maiden left carved into the trunks of beech trees, the sign the Mother burned into her dragon-scale armor, the sign the Crone pressed into the leather covers of books. Beatrice has seen it printed in blurred ink in the appendices of medieval histories and described in the journals of witch-hunters and occasionally mis-identified in Church pamphlets as the Sign of Satan.

It doesn’t belong in the modern world. It certainly doesn’t belong in the City Without Sin, carved into a door on a tower that shouldn’t exist.

Beatrice escapes the labyrinth of the West Babel slums with her skin humming and her fingers shaking. She flags down a trolley and lets the electric whir drown out the rising hustle of the city, the calls of west-side street vendors and the misery of the mills and even the memory of her sisters’ faces, fresh and sharp as mint-leaves in her mouth.

(They’re alive and whole and their daddy is dead. The thought is deafening, a flood of hope and dread and hurt. )

Mr. Blackwell isn’t yet at his desk when Beatrice arrives at the library. Beatrice is relieved; there will be no one to see her pale-faced and rumpled in the same dress she wore yesterday.

She left the window open overnight and her office smells cool and damp, as if she is stepping into a starlit wood instead of a cramped room. The Sisters Grimm lies open on her desk, its pages rippling softly in the breeze.

Beatrice flips to the final page of the final story, traces the verse in faded ink. The wayward sisters, hand in hand. She thinks the spell looks somehow even fainter, as if it’s aged several decades since Beatrice last saw it; she thinks she might be losing her mind.

She turns back to the title page: The Tale of Saint George and the Witches. Mama Mags’s version was nothing like the Grimms’, all neat and cheery. The way she told it the Last Three had not flown to Avalon in terror, but in a desperate attempt to save the last remnants of their power from the purge. They’d built something—some great construct of stone and time and magic—that preserved the wicked heart of women’s magic like seeds saved after the winnowing.

Sometimes Mags said Saint George had simply torched their working along with the Three themselves. Other times she said it had vanished along with the isle of Avalon itself, drifting out of time and mind, lost to the world. But, she would whisper with a wink, what is lost, that can’t be found, Belladonna?

(Mags had always called them by their mother’s-names—the old-fashioned second-names given by mothers to daughters—but St. Hale’s had found the practice blasphemous. Eventually Beatrice had learned to forget the heathen indulgence of her mother’s-name and become merely Beatrice. )

Beatrice has heard similar portents and promises over the years, has even heard it given a name: the Lost Way of Avalon. It’s an absurdity, she knows—the Last Three themselves are three-quarters myth and witch-tale, generally only taken seriously by oracles or zealots or the occasional seditious schoolgirl—and Beatrice doesn’t see how witchcraft could be bound to a single place or object.

And yet.

Yesterday Beatrice stood beneath the light of strange stars in the shadow of a black tower, where her sister saw the sign of the Last Three.

What is lost, that can’t be found? The words Mags taught them alongside a hundred other songs and rhymes. Senseless, silly, utterly insignificant to the grand warp and weft of time.

Unless they aren’t. Unless there are words and ways waiting among the children’s verses; power passed in secret from mother to daughter, like swords disguised as sewing needles.

Beatrice removes her little black notebook from its drawer and writes out the entirety of The Tale of the Sleeping Maiden. She stares out the window, thinking of maidens and drops of blood and tall towers surrounded by roses and truths wrapped in lies.

There’s a strange wriggle in the corner of Beatrice’s eye. Her gaze flicks back to the desk: there is an odd, many-fingered shadow cast over the Grimms’ book.

She draws the page cautiously away. It’s unchanged, except perhaps that the ink is a shade paler and the paper slightly thinner. Older.

The shadow-hand retreats as she watches, coiling back into a dim corner of her office and lying still, as if it were an ordinary shadow cast by a bookshelf or desktop.

A cold foreboding spins over Beatrice’s skin. She has the sudden urge either to fling the book out the window or clutch it tight to her chest, but before she can do either there’s a wooden knock against her office door.

Beatrice flinches, picturing police or witch-hunters or at least Miss Munley, the secretary, but she feels a silent tug and knows, quite suddenly and illogically, who is standing in the hall beating her staff against her door.

Her youngest sister glares at her as she opens it, mouth thin and eyes hot. “If you wanted to run off, you shouldn’t’ve left a breadcrumb trail behind you. ” She waves her staff in midair, gesturing at the invisible thing between them.

“Oh! It must be a leftover effect of yesterday’s—events. A spell was begun but not finished, like thread that wasn’t tied off properly. ” Beatrice can see from Juniper’s expression that she doesn’t particularly care what it is or how it got there, that she is just a half-step away from an act of violence. Beatrice swallows. “Ah, come in. I’m sorry I ran off this morning. ”

“It’s about that tower, isn’t it? You know what it is. ” Juniper gives her a searching look.

I think it’s the Lost Way of Avalon. The thought is heady, dizzying, too dangerous to speak aloud even in the soft-shadowed halls of Salem College. “I don’t know. I’m considering some s-some possibilities, is all. ”

Juniper watches her with a narrow-eyed expression that says she doesn’t believe her and is weighing whether or not to make something of it. “Alright. I can help you consider them. ”

“I’m not sure—”

“And I’m joining the suffrage ladies, like I said. You know where to find them? They got an office somewhere? ”

“Three blocks north, on St. Patience. But…” Beatrice wets her lips, unsure how much she should or shouldn’t tell her baby sister who has become this prowling, perilous woman. “But I’m not sure the suffragists have anything to do with that tower, or the sp-spell we felt. ” She stumbles over the word, recalling the hot taste of witching in her mouth.

Juniper shoots her another sideways look. “I might not have a lot of fancy schooling like you, but I’m not stupid. You don’t get Devil’s-fever from standing around and watching, Bell. Mags said it comes of working witching stronger than yourself. ” Beatrice is opening her mouth in confession or denial, but Juniper is already looking past her. “Maybe you’re right, and they didn’t have anything to do with it. Still. Seems to me they’re the same thing, more or less. ”

“What are? ”

Juniper’s eyes reflect the bronze shine of Saint George’s standing in the square. “Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have. ” The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes.

“They’re both children’s stories, June. ” Beatrice doesn’t know if she’s telling her sister or herself.

Juniper shrugs without looking away from the square. “They’re better than the story we were given. ” Beatrice thinks about their story and doesn’t disagree.

Juniper’s eyes slide to hers, flashing green. “Maybe we can change it, if we try. Skip into some better story. ” And Beatrice sees that she means it, that beneath all Juniper’s bitter rage there’s still a little girl who believes in happy endings. It makes Beatrice want to slap her or hold her, to send Juniper home before New Salem teaches her different.

But she can tell from the iron shape of Juniper’s jaw that she wouldn’t go, that she’s charted a course toward trouble and means to find it.

“I—I’ll take you to the Women’s Association. After work. ”

“And I need a place to stay. ”

“What about Agnes? ”

Frost crackles down the line between them at the mention of her name.

“I see. Well, I rent a room a few blocks east. You’re welcome to stay until…” She isn’t sure how to end her sentence. Until women win the vote in New Salem? Until they call back the Lost Way and return witching to the world? Until the sullen red is gone from Juniper’s eyes?

“Until things settle down, ” she finishes lamely. Her sister smiles in a way that makes Beatrice suspect that things, whatever they are, will not settle at all.

 

 

Hush a bye, baby, bite your tongue,

Not a word shall be sung.

A spell for quiet, requiring a clipped feather & a bitten tongue

James Juniper wanted Bella to skip work and head straight to the suffrage ladies, but Bella insisted that she had “obligations and responsibilities” and made Juniper sit on a teetery pile of encyclopedias while she worked, which lasted until Juniper got bored and slipped out the door to wander the hushed halls of the Salem College Library.

It’s still early, and there’s a stillness to the air that reminds Juniper of walking the mountainside just before dawn, in that silent second after the night-creatures have bedded down but before the morning-birds have started up. It feels secret, stolen out of time, like you might see the ragged point of a witch’s hat or the gleam of dragon-scales in the shadows. Juniper closes her eyes and pretends the wood-pulp pages around her are wet and alive, pumping with sap instead of ink. She wonders if her sister ever stands like this—missing home, missing her—and feels a fragile sprout of sympathy take root in her chest.

She hears the rattle-creak of a library cart and opens her eyes to find a prissy, toothy woman hissing at her in a whisper that’s several times louder than a regular old speaking voice. She goes on about library hours and permissions and “the stacks, ” although none of the books looked stacked to Juniper, and Juniper is about to cause what Mama Mags would call “a scene” when an affable-looking gentleman with tufty ear-hair rescues her and herds her back to Bella’s office.

Bella blinks up at them through her spectacles and says, “What—oh. I’m so sorry. Thank you, Mr. Blackwell. My sister has never been fond of the rules. ”

There’s a little pause, while Bella attempts to glare at Juniper and Juniper attempts to dodge, before the hairy-eared gentleman says softly, “I didn’t know you had a sister, Beatrice. ”

Juniper feels that fragile sprout of sympathy wither and die. The truth is that her sisters ran off and never looked back, never even spoke her name, and they’re only together now because of happenstance and a half-spun spell.

Juniper feels Bella watching her and works hard to keep her stupid eyes from filling up with stupid tears.

Mr. Blackwell looks between the two of them with lines of concern crimping his brows. “I never liked the rules much either, to be honest, ” he offers. Then he bows to Juniper as if Juniper is the kind of lady who gets bowed to. “Lovely to meet you, Miss Eastwood. ”

He leaves them alone together.

Juniper perches back on the encyclopedia stack to wait and doesn’t say anything. Neither does Bella. For a few hours the office is quiet except for the scritch of Bella’s pen and the kick of Juniper’s heels against book-spines.

At noon Bella screws the cap back onto her ink bottle and stands. “Well. Are you ready to join the women’s movement, Juniper? ” She gives her a small, not very good smile that Juniper guesses is supposed to be an apology, which Juniper neither accepts nor denies. Instead she shrugs to her feet, toppling the encyclopedias behind her.

Bella looks her up and down—muddy hem to briar-scratched arms—and sighs a little. “There’s a washroom down the hall. At least brush your hair. You look like an escaped convict. ” Juniper barely suppresses a cackle.

It turns out brushing her hair isn’t enough. Bella produces a stiff woolen dress from her office closet. It’s one of those respectable, pocketless affairs that obliges ladies to carry stupid little handbags, so Juniper can’t take so much as a melted candle-stub or a single snake tooth with her. Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women’s dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much.

In the end Juniper goes to see the suffragists entirely disarmed, except for her cedar staff.

She doesn’t know what she was expecting the headquarters of the New Salem Women’s Association to look like—an embattled army camp, perhaps, or a black-stone castle guarded by lady-knights—but it turns out to be a respectable-looking office with plate-glass windows and oak paneling and a pretty secretary who says “oh! ” when the bell rings.

The secretary is Juniper’s age, with hair the color of cornsilk and a crookedy nose that looks like it was broken at least once. Her eyes slide between Bella and Juniper and return to Bella, apparently deciding she’s the more civilized of the two. “May I… help you? ” Her eyes flick back to Juniper during the pause, lingering on the sawed-off edges of her hair.

Bella offers a polite smile. “Hello. I’m Miss Beatrice Eastwood and this is my sister, Miss Jame—”

It is at that moment that Juniper recalls the wanted posters currently spelling out her name in all capital letters across half the city, and intercedes. “June. Miss June… West. ” She glances at her sister, who looks like a taller, skinnier version of her. “We’re just half-sisters, see. ” She can feel Bella giving her a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you look and ignores it. She sticks her hand out to the secretary. “Pleased to meet you. ”



  

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